This post is about creating a Raspberry pi powered remote control car. Before we start I hope you have got your raspberry pi ready and you are able to SSH into it and connect your pi to your wifi network. If not here are two posts on these:

Assemble Car and wires

Assemble your Car chassis and connect wires to motors and battery holder case. The Car chassis should have all the instructions with it.

There are 3 sets of wires here:

Left pair (red-white) for left motor. Polarity of wires is not important.

Right pair (red-white) for right motor. Polarity of wires is not important.

Center pair (red-black) for power from batteries. Red wire being positive (+). This is important.

Getting the Raspberry pi ready

Note my pi has got a case but its not required. Skip the case if you want to.

Now we need to fit the Motor controller board on our Pi. The motor controller board has 20 pins that sit right on top for the first 20 pins of the Pi. Do not mess up the pins else you risk your pi.

Connect the Pi to the Car

Place the Pi on the car chassis and attach it with tiny screws. The chassis has holes for you to fix the Pi on it. I just used few strings to tie the Pi on the car chassis 🙂

Attach the motor wires to the motor slots on the motor controller board. Note the motor wires can go in any of the two slots provided, but the power wires should go in the right slots. Check here for the circuit diagram and look at the image attached below.

Thats all for the hardware part of this post. If you Connect the Pi to a portable power bank you would be able to start the pi and SSH into the Pi.

Software Section

SSH into the pi

We should be able to ssh into our Pi when its powered by a power bank. Note it may take a minute or two to start and then you could ssh into the Pi. Read this post if you haven’t been able to ssh into it – SSH into a raspberry pi and connect pi to wifi

ssh pi@192.168.1.5

Open terminal and substitute the IP address of your pi in the above command and ssh in. It would prompt you for the password. The default password for the user pi is raspberry.

You can get the ip address of your Pi by :

physically logging in your Pi via a keyboard or screen and using the command ifconfig.

Using network tools like – Ping Tools which shows you ip’s of all devices on your local network.

Install Pip and python libraries

Install the required dependencies on your Raspberry pi. Use the below commands.